Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  The order of bulbs from Van Engelen had come in the day before. Hooper was excited to be taking his garden in a new and lush direction, despite his ongoing quarrel with the thieving bushy-tailed tree rats other people called squirrels. Of the two thousand bulbs in the order, twelve hundred were his. To Hooper, the assortment represented the future. He loaded the Van Engelen boxes into the back of his SUV. Although they were half empty, he couldn’t move the bulbs from one cardboard box to another because the names of the varieties had been scrawled on the outsides. Some of the individual packages of bulbs had been opened and used by others in the group.

  After the boxes were loaded, Hooper found a bag of bone meal and added two large bags of a neutral-pH planting soil mixed with aged leaf compost. And then he was on his way. He drove carefully, peering at oncoming traffic through his new bifocals, tilting his head slightly to bring bits of the outside world into sharper focus.

  Hooper saw three squirrels hopping about in his front yard as he backed the SUV into the driveway and then inside his garage. He would store most of the bulbs, the ones he couldn’t get to right way, in the refrigerator in the garage, keeping them fresh and hungry for warm, soft soil. He tumbled out of the vehicle as happy as a schoolboy.

  When he opened the back of the vehicle, he found two light green eyes looking at him from inside one of the boxes of bulbs.

  “Hello there,” Hooper said.

  The yellow cat lifted her head from the box, staring not so much at Hooper as somewhere beyond, as if listening to the call of a bird in the distance.

  “Where did you come from?”

  Hooper saw a flash of nose and whiskers. In an instant, the cat was out of the box, out of the SUV, and out of the garage. He followed the cat around the side of his house. He pushed up his glasses with one finger and watched the sleek yellow cat go over the garden fence in a single movement.

  The cat was in the garden.

  “Hey, cat!”

  Hooper opened the gate and breathed in the airy fragrance of the last blooms of the doubled pink Stanwell perpetual roses that covered sixteen feet of lattice on the inside of his garden fence. He walked well into the acre of garden and discovered the cat was sitting on the stone bench by the koi pond. She must have been drawn by the sound of water. Now, her tail twitched. Her four legs cocked. She was watching something with great intensity, ignoring Hooper’s approach.

  A squirrel hopped across the wide path in front of the arbor, its fluffy tail flagging up and down. It paused, chattered, then hopped again. The cat was off the bench in a second, rushing the squirrel at full speed, chasing it across the rock garden and up a small decorative redbud. Two sparrows flew quickly from the tree. The limber branches bounced and waved as the cat shot up the tree as quickly as the squirrel in front of her.

  Soon, the squirrel had run to the narrow end of a redbud branch and turned to face the yellow cat. Undeterred, and in perfect balance on the limb, the cat came quickly after the squirrel. To Hooper’s amazement, the squirrel, trying to back up further, lost purchase and fell to the ground with a thud. Two heart-shaped leaves torn from the tree floated down after it.

  The squirrel seemed stunned in the grass, but only for a moment. It righted itself and sped to the nearest edge of the garden. In fear for its life, it raced up the fence and leapt into the neighbor’s yard. The yellow cat lazed on her perch above.

  Although he had much to do first, and though proper introductions were in order, Hooper knew at that very moment he had made a valuable acquaintance. He kept his fingers crossed, went inside the house, and called the garden center. The collarless yellow cat, he learned, was a stray. She had been pestering people at the garden center for the past few days, playing among the plants, drinking from the water pail.

  “We have a cat,” he told his wife.

  Hooper ran a quick series of errands and came home with a cat carrier, a litter box, litter, feeding and water dishes, and four brands of cat food.

  Mae rushed out the front door as Hooper pulled into the driveway.

  “Just horrid,” she told him. “It was just horrid!”

  What could have happened? Had one of their kids called with a problem? Hillary was pregnant, and there had been problems with her first delivery, although all had turned out well.

  “The cat …,” Mae sputtered, pointing in the general direction of the garden. “That cat! It killed a squirrel, Hooper! It was just horrid. All the screeching, and the other squirrels in the trees and on the fence were chattering like monkeys. They were screaming at the cat, Hooper, I swear.”

  “Calm down, darling. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay. Listen to me, there is a dead squirrel in the yard, and that cat … that cat refuses to leave. He just sits on the stone bench like it’s his now.”

  “Hers,” Hooper corrected. “It’s her bench now.”

  “But it was bloody murder, Hoop! You aren’t listening to me!”

  Not listening to Mae twenty-four hours a day was part of the reason the retired dentist had started gardening in the first place. Of course, he didn’t say so.

  “It can’t … it cannot, absolutely cannot happen again! Do you hear me? I will go out of my mind if I ever have to see or hear a squirrel being murdered again.”

  “It likely won’t,” Hooper said nonchalantly. He handed Mae the cat carrier from the backseat. “The other squirrels were watching, you see. They know now. Cleo’s yard is off-limits. Strictly off-limits to squirrels from this day on.”

  “Cleo?”

  “Short for Cleome, our cat. Did you see the whiskers on her? They look just like Cleome hassleriana.”

  “Not our cat,” Mae said. “Your cat. She’s your cat. I don’t want anything to do with squirrel killers. Not a single thing.”

  “Let’s just hope she likes some of this food.”

  Hooper unloaded the rest of his purchases. He called the veterinarian, who told him to bring the new cat in anytime. The vet was always pleased to work with newly adopted strays.

  It took Hooper three days of placing food inside the open cat carrier that he set in the garden each morning before Cleo would approach her food while he was present. That afternoon, he placed a small toy laced with catnip in the cat carrier. Soon, they were on their way to the vet’s.

  Hooper explained everything to the yellow cat during the drive.

  “You have a home, Cleo, for as long as you like. It’s yours. The garden and the house. You’ll love the plants. And the pond. Of course, you are already fond of that, aren’t you? Be careful with Mae for a bit, but she’ll come around. You’ll see.”

  She didn’t seem to mind being in the cat carrier. She liked being in boxes, after all. The carrier was her space to occupy, and she knew it instantly, just as she knew the garden would be her forever home. Cats prefer to live in one place their entire lives and to make it their territory. Cleo was no exception.

  Cleo was spayed, treated for ear mites, bathed, vaccinated. Tagged and collared.

  “You have a valuable cat,” the vet informed Hooper. “Usually, only feral cats will take on a squirrel. Cleo here is lithe and strong. She is young and ready to have a home. She’ll bond quickly, with just a little kindness.”

  “She’ll get plenty of attention. I spend all day in the garden, and she seems to like it there.”

  “Start by scratching the top of her head between her ears, then a little on down the back of her neck. Don’t touch her tail, and you’ll be rubbing her entire back in no time. Oh, a little gentle stroking under the chin goes a long way with cats.”

  Hooper nodded.

  “Find a place she likes to be and quietly occupy that space with her. She’ll get used to you quickly. When she starts bunting, she’ll be your cat.”

  “Bunting?”

  The veterinarian grinned. “She’ll rub her head on you when she has the opportunity. She’ll bunt her head on your hands and your arms, on your legs. This is how cats scent the people they own. She’ll striv
e to keep her scent on you, so other animals will know you’re taken.”

  Hooper laughed. “That I am, doctor.” He pushed his glasses back into place. “That I am.”

  The bulbs took to the blessings of nature in Hooper’s garden over the years. Many became naturalized. Cleo created secret cat trails through the flower beds, and hid when she felt like hiding under dropping leaves and the blossoms of her favorite plants. Cleo always started her morning by lying stretched out in the sun in the middle of the garden, where she could be seen by the squirrels, if any of them were wondering whether or not the coast was clear yet. It wasn’t.

  Hooper started his days for the next several years by sitting on the stone bench, watching the brightly colored koi swimming in suspended motion and then darting under the shade of the watercress, which drifted away from the current. Cleo watched with him. It was her bench, after all. Her whiskers and eyebrows twitched when one of the smaller fish darted by.

  Sometimes, the two of them talked. Sometimes, they didn’t say a word and simply listened to the moving water in the pond, to the morning songs of birds carried on the breeze.

  When it was time to feed the koi, Cleo was particularly enthralled to see the brightly colored fish lift their heads from the water, their mouths open and moving, as if to speak. The fish had whiskers, just like she did. Cleo moved her mouth, flexing her own whiskers, as if lip reading what the fish might have to say. She understood somehow that she and Hooper were the caretakers of the spotted underwater wildlife and never once troubled a single koi by batting the water with her paw. Well, not that Hooper was aware of, anyway.

  No matter how early Mae got up in the morning, she would see Hooper and Cleo from the windows of the house, already in the garden. Early sunlight reflected from the lenses of his glasses as he looked at every plant, said hello to every fish. Cleo’s head moved with his, seeing what he saw. Even in the coldest weather, he sat with his first cup of coffee on the bench beside the pond.

  As Hooper aged and his time grew near, he talked to Mae often about seeing heaven.

  “Heaven is a garden, I bet,” he said. “And everything is in bloom in heaven. Heaven is a garden and a cat.”

  Hooper was in his eighties when he fell in the garden from a stroke and hit his head. He lay in his hospital bed for about a week, unconscious but at peaceful rest, until he passed away.

  The night before the funeral, Mae looked high and low for Hooper’s glasses. They hadn’t taken them to the hospital. Hooper, she knew, needed his glasses. If he were buried without his glasses, he wouldn’t be able to see much of heaven at all. She couldn’t find them anywhere. She looked on every surface in the house, in every drawer, under every piece of furniture.

  Hillary spent the week at her mother’s house. Her youngest, just sixteen now, stayed, too, wondering out loud if she was too chubby to ever be loved by anyone who was really cool. Three generations of women searched the house for Grandpa’s glasses, to no avail.

  Mae couldn’t sleep. As early as the sun came up, she was peering out the windows, pacing. Thinking of a new place Hooper’s glasses might be, she flung the cushions from the couch. No glasses there.

  Cleo walked silently into the room and watched her.

  “What are you looking at?” Mae wanted to know.

  The tall yellow cat twitched her whiskers, studying the situation.

  “Help me find his glasses,” Mae pleaded with the cat. “Won’t you help?”

  Cleo walked into the kitchen, twitching her tail.

  “It’s time for breakfast, isn’t it?” Mae said. “Oh, all right then.”

  She followed Cleo into the kitchen. But instead of waiting to be fed, Cleo walked purposefully to the sliding glass door that led into the garden.

  “Well, go outside then and look for his glasses.” Mae let the cat out.

  She continued wandering through the rooms of the house, trying to think of anyplace she hadn’t already looked twice for Hooper’s glasses.

  From an upstairs window, she saw Hooper in the garden. She stopped in her tracks. She stared out the window as hard as an old woman can stare.

  Hooper stood by the Japanese maple. He looked so peaceful that Mae smiled to see him standing there. He even winked at her. She saw him wink! When he winked, Mae realized he wasn’t wearing his glasses, and the peaceful feeling evaporated into empty air. She hurried back downstairs to look more closely at the garden, to find the red-leafed maple, the bench, to see if Hooper was really there.

  Cleo was at the glass door, reaching both paws high above her head and letting them slide down the glass. She left muddy streaks.

  “Damn cat,” Mae muttered. She slid the door open to let Cleo back into the house. The yellow cat was soaking wet. She looked skinny and harmless and pathetic. Cleo sat just inside the glass door. She licked a front paw carefully. She licked the other one.

  It was not raining. The hoses hadn’t been turned on. The sprinklers were quiet.

  “You’ve been in the pond,” Mae said. “There’ll be no more of that, young lady!”

  Mae retrieved a tea towel from the kitchen, then stopped. The pond! She rushed outdoors. A very wet Cleo followed her out, then quickly took the lead, eagerly showing Mae the way along the pebbled path to the koi pond. Cleo strode to a particular spot at the pond’s edge and sat on her hind legs, watching the water, her whiskers pointed forward.

  Peering through the circulating water, looking beyond the brightly colored koi, Mae saw them at last. Her heart leapt. Hooper’s glasses were in the pond. It was where he fell when he had his stroke. Right where Cleo was sitting.

  Mae fished them out of the pond and hurried into the house with her critical prize. Hooper would see heaven now. She rinsed and dried off the glasses with care, polishing the thick lenses. She’d have Hillary take them to the funeral home.

  Excited to tell the first one up that she had found Hooper’s glasses, Mae showed them to her sixteen-year-old sleepy-eyed granddaughter.

  “Where were they, Grandma?”

  “In the pond.” Mae smiled triumphantly. “They were in the pond. But I didn’t find them, Cleo did.”

  “Cleo?”

  “Our cat, dear. Lordy, she was wet. She’d been in the pond. We went outside together, and she took me right to them. And there they were. Isn’t that something?”

  “Yes … yes, it is,” the teenager stammered. “Cleo’s been dead for two years now, Grandma. She’s buried by the ruffled daffodils out back. Don’t you remember?”

  Mae touched a finger to her upper lip. When she checked the sliding door for muddy paw streaks, the glass was as clean as a whisker on a cat.

  ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

  Rose Perfume

  A seventeenth-century Spanish fort still stands on the Atlantic coast of Florida. The well-preserved Castillo de San Marcos, located in a twenty-five-acre park in St. Augustine, holds a place in the earliest colonial history of America. The original stonework of the national monument also holds the story of two lovers and a cat.

  Their story is carried on the air as the scent of rose perfume, a perfume that cannot be covered by stone.

  The rose perfume masks a deeper, sickly odor.

  While the fort was undergoing expansion in the 1740s, a Spanish war galleon sailed through the St. Augustine inlet with a cat on board, carried in the arms of a young military bride. The small domestic pet was destined to become the oldest known cat ghost in the American South.

  The feline walks the grounds of the historic Castillo de San Marcos on silent paws yet today. A sighting of the cat is always accompanied by the smell of rose perfume. Throughout the South, the “San Marcos Cat” has become known as a ghost of eternal love.

  Visitors who have seen the creature say the cat is gray. But it may be that only the ghost of the cat is gray. Old ghosts sometimes fade in color over the centuries. All witnesses note, though, that the cat wears a shiny silver collar. Most visitors never see the cat at all, but many have been surpri
sed by the scent of rose perfume at one turn or another among the walls of coquina shells and stone.

  History does not record the name of the cat attached to the painful demise of two lovers who found themselves doomed to die slowly within the impenetrable walls of the Castillo de San Marcos.

  Only the cat could keep them alive.

  Only the cat could bring them death.

  The Spanish began construction of the Castillo de San Marcos in 1672, when St. Augustine was at the edge of the known world. A far-outlying bastion of the largest empire ever created, the fort was constructed to protect and defend Spain’s claims in the New World. Though caught in the whirlwind of early colonial warfare between Spain and Britain, the fort itself was never defeated in battle. Outside, its scarred walls still stand witness to bombardment and battle. Inside, the stone walls of one room witnessed a smaller story on the world’s stage, a story of undying human love and the devotion of a small domestic cat to her human mistress.

  When the structure underwent refortification in the 1740s, the interior rooms were extended into the courtyard to make them deeper. Vaulted ceilings replaced the wooden roof. The coquina-and-stone ceilings also made it possible to mount heavy Spanish cannons around the perimeter of the gun deck, rather than just in the corner bastions, as in the original design.

  The construction was overseen by a Spanish colonel who sailed to the Americas with his young bride and an entourage of attendants and servants. Colonel Luis Gaspar was an aging favorite of the Spanish throne. His marriage to the young and spirited Marianna was his third. The young girl was given in marriage by her father in an arrangement for anticipated political favors.